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Mach 6 Test Aircraft Set For Trials
coondoggie writes "The aspiration that jets may someday fly at over six times the speed of sound took a very real step toward reality recently, as the US Air Force said it successfully married the test aircraft, known as the X-51A WaveRider, to a B-52 in preparation for a Dec. 2 flight test. The X-51A flight tests are intended to demonstrate that the engines can achieve their desired speed without disintegrating. While the X-51 looks like a large rocket now, its applications could change the way aircraft or spaceships are designed, fly into space, support reconnaissance missions and handle long-distance flight operations. At the heart of the test is the aircraft's air-breathing hypersonic scramjet system."
Engines reaching desired speed without disintegrating....thats a GOOD feature to have.
If you can achieve your desired speed without disintegrating, you got a engine.
If you can achieve your desired speed while disintegrating, you got a rocket.
Mach 6, how blades is that?
WHOOOSH!
(ducks)
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Which costs more energy - carrying the extra O2, or overcoming the friction from having to accelerate in an atmosphere? Which imposes more design compromises?
Which would be more economical in the long run? Bear in mind that there are 2 kinds of people that need to achieve very high velocities -- astronauts trying to make orbit and intercontinental travelers trying to get to the other side of the world.
This appears to be more about the development of a hypersonic cruise missile than an actual aircraft.
While the X-51 looks like a large rocket now, its applications could change the way aircraft or spaceships are designed, fly into space, support reconnaissance missions and handle long-distance flight operations.
The Concorde flew at 2.2 Mach and in order to achieve this, it ended up too expensive to create, manufacture and maintain. It would be awkward to see airlines adopt airplanes which are more expensive to fly than current models. The trend is towards less fuel usage, and cheaper flight, in fact, at the expense of speed at times. On the other hand I'm happy to see that US is working heavily on creating a replacement for F-22, an insanely expensive jet with a nearly 30 year history that was barely ever used for something at all, before being discontinued :P...
Recent advances in the production of titanium may bring this metal into wide use in airframes. And everything else.
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/hyperrev-x15/ch-0.html
perhaps one of the tags should have been "been there, done that"
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
The X-43 already did mach 9.68.
This is actually a bigger step towards making a mach 6 missile rather then a mach 6 plane....
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
For some reason at first glance I read "Mach 6 Test Aircraft for sale" and I reached for my wallet...
But will this development be recognized outside of states like California and Massachusetts?
Pfft, the space shuttle already travels at 23 to 26 mach.
Serious aviation/aerospace buffs know this is all VERY old news...
Twice as fast as a Mach 3 shaver!
What ever happened to the Aurora?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
You seem to have an acute case of rectal-cranial inversion.
... they could save me more travel time by not making me take my shoes off and stand in endless, pointless security lines.
Have gnu, will travel.
Since most vehicles, including aircraft, are named after girls, would this be considered a gay marriage?
At some point, some of the Black projects bear fruit. We now need to admit that this can happen, now that we want to go big with it. Sorta like stealth, we had it for a while but at some point needed to go "white" with it. If it is ready for prime time, cool. You didn't think the SR 71 wasn't replaced, did you ?
So if you look at the front of that thing, perhaps easier to see if you go to the hi-res photo, it kinda looks like the front of an an X-wing fighter...
Not knowing the mass of this thing, if Mach 6 is achieved, how close will this be to achieving escape velocity, and in fact, is that the real goal of the exercise?
sek
Is that somewhere around Warp 2?
It's no Concorde in any sense. The Concorde was created to make an efficient aircraft, not a fast one. This is the history I learned in college:
Jet engines are more economical the faster you get. Too bad the air friction (drag) gets worse the faster you get. For subsonic aircraft with single flow engines, the optimum lies just a bit below the speed of sound. As there were only single-flow jet engines at that time, the Concorde was created to try to shift the optimum to above the speed of sound. They succeeded in that.
But then, the multi-flow jet engine was invented. Instead of blowing the air out even faster, a more powerful jet engine could now mount an extra turbine that drove an extra flow of air, thereby spreading the power over more air, that was accelerated less. Bummer. Now the Concorde was just a fancy fast-flying airliner.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Scramjet tech is worthless. It's not a very good weapon - a scramjet is going to have one heck of a heat signature and probably can't be very stealthy. Not just from the exhaust...at Mach 6 the entire aircraft/missile is going to be glowing red from heat. Also, air to air missiles (like the Patriot) that use rockets already go that fast.
Second, it's worthless for getting stuff into orbit. The reason is simple - the reason a rocket costs so darn much has nothing to do with fuel. It has to do with complexity - it's very expensive to make something as complicated as a rocket work under all the stresses of a launch. A scramjet just worsens the problem. It's not the fuel or the size of the tankage that makes the rockets that SpaceX builds cost so much. It has to do with building the rocket well enough that it makes it and doesn't fail (again). A scramjet engine is evidently incredibly complex to make work, and is just another pork barrel project of the air force.
...which raises the question: can a scramjet survive ducks any better than a jet engine?
When are they going to get around to replacing the X-302s? (AKA F-302)
Those hyperdrives are might unstable, surely they could use the Asgard knowledge base to build a stable engine?
It's hypersonic. If you hear the WOOOSH, it's too late to duck.
Such short-sightedness. We did a 10 second burn earlier on the X-43 and so did Australia. Both of them were just tests of concepts. This is another longer lasting test. Will it lead to a super fast Missile? Yup. BUT, then again, China, as well as Russia, are also working on the same thing. In fact, that is what drove our tech from NASA to DOD. Both China and Russia have QUIETLY made several attempts at this, and failed.
Now, were else will this lead? Almost certainly it will lead to a new military drone (within 10 years, probably sooner). BUT, it will also lead to a space vehicle also by 2020. Keep in mind that the goal of a space vehicle is to get SPEED. Once we develop an engine that handles the majority of the supersonic range, then this will be a reality for such a space vehicle. That will drop the price of launching humans or possibly cargo.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You didn't think the SR 71 wasn't replaced, did you ?
Um... Yeah, it was replaced... With *satellites*.
And just a word of wisdom from someone who works for 'the dark side': Supersonic aircraft are not stealthy--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_boom
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/xplanes/stea-flash.html
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
The SR-71 was replaced. By spy satellites. Ever used Google Maps? That uses satellites photos. Now imagine something higher resolution and with dynamic updates.
Actually I've heard that they're supposed to be more resilient than jet engines, because they don't have all those tiny little rapidly-spinning compressor blades. The compression is accomplished just from the pressure of the incoming air, the shape of the scramjet, and the combustion of the fuel (and doesnt it combust due to the high pressure / hence heat?)
I dunno. I've not looked into them for a while now and I'm not an experimental-propulsion-systems-making-dude, so I may be a bit off, but it's my understanding that ram and scramjets should be less vulnerable to ducks.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
phssssssssssssssst Mach 6, I go Mach Nipple everywhere I go, that's why I have inverted nipples.
Yes, but the problem with sats is that everyone knows when they go by. A fast plane is not predictable. Mach five with stealth, even minimal stealth, will be in and out before the enemy can do anything.
If hit just the right way, I think it will result in a duck being flung into space.
Hey, Ridley, ya got any Beeman's?
Yes, but the problem with sats is that everyone knows when they go by. A fast plane is not predictable. Mach five with stealth, even minimal stealth, will be in and out before the enemy can do anything.
And miss most things of any tactical value in that time. There is a place for fast places, in strategic recon, which happens to be a lot harder to hide from satellites. We are going toward slower (I prefer the term lumbering) platforms with awesome endurance for tactical recon, staring is better than glimpsing in that case.
-- toolie
Many Google Maps pictures are from small airplane photography.
The Falcon is a DARPA vehicle that looks a lot more practical.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
On the other hand, achieving scramjet combustion seems to be extremely difficult. It could be that duck ingestion stops the combustion process and then you have to attempt re-ignition in a nose-dive or something.
If you deliver bombs instead of passengers, the overhead is lower.